L2/09-331 2009-10-07

Title: Proposal to Deprecate    Source: Anshuman Pandey ([email protected]) Status: Individual Contribution Action: For consideration by UTC Date: 2009-10-07

1 Introduction

This is a proposal to deprecate the character ૱ +0AF1   . The character is an abbrevi- ation of the Gujarati word િપયો rūpiyo > rū. The character ૱ may be decomposed as ર +0AB0    + ◌ૂ +0AC2     + an abbreviation sign. The ligature is the common representation of  +   . The circle element is an abbreviation sign analogous to ॰ +0970   . The word ‘rupee’ is abbreviated in other scripts according to a similar composition, eg. Devanagari पया rupayā > ॰ ru. ( +    +  ).

2 Analysis

The Government of introduced the    to the Unicode Technical Committee through L2/01-304, as one of several additions for Gujarati. The UTC accepted the sign for encoding because “the symbol is not made from pieces that are already encoded Gujarati characters” (L2/01-430R: 7). The en- coding of the abbreviation ૱ as an atomic character motivated India to propose the Devanagari analogue ॰ for encoding as    (L2/04-236, L2/05-063). The UTC responded appropriately in L2/05-070, stating that the

Devanagari currency sign is already representable by “Ra + U-sign + abbreviation sign”. Many currency signs are simple combinations of letters, e.g. sFr for Swiss Franc. Would need to establish that the proposal has a unique shape. Can add as named sequence.

The    is a simple combination of letters. It is not an atomic character. The shape ૱ is not a unique sign for representing currency in Gujarati; the abbreviation is also written as ‘.’ using the Latin fullstop in place of the circular abbreviation sign. The rationale for encoding    should be reconsidered according to these positions.

3 Conclusion

The    should be deprecated and added as a named sequence. This requires the encoding of an   for Gujarati, for which a proposal has been submitted (L2/09-330). If the proposal is approved, the character may be defined as  +    +  :

GUJARATIRUPEESIGN;0AB00AC20AF0

Future proposals for the addition of abbreviations as atomic characters in Indic scripts should considered in the light of UTC’s view that such characters are ‘simple combinations of letters’. Abbreviation signs are not yet encoded for several Indic scripts. They should be added as necessary to prevent the encoding of abbreviations as atomic characters and appropriately as character sequences.